Some comments of your suggestion of modularization.
I just wanted to make a quick update to the live CD, then move on to other projects, but the scope had gotten out of hand a bit (with the windows installer and such). You are completely right that the approach of having a seperated sfs of sage and maybe additional packages would be superior, but I shunned from it, because I wanted it to work beginning with the first successfull boot.

Right now imagine you have a windows user who wants to try ("just try") sage. I don't speak of repartitioning or installing grub or other arcane stuff. With the windows installer there is really a simple method to get a frugal install to the windows partition. So the OS will run with the 1st reboot.
But then you have to create a savefile (2nd reboot). and then you have to mark the sfs in the Bootmanager in a "hidden" submenu and make the 3rd reboot. So to get sage.sfs to run you need a minimum of 3 reboots.
EDIT: OF course you just need 2 reboots, I was carried away a bit here.

Maybe there is an easy possibility to tell puppy to mount additional sfs also during 1.st boot (it is somwhere, there is the drivers sfs). This would make setting up modular live systems much easier and maintainable.

emilLast edited by emil on Mon 20 Dec 2010, 03:57; edited 1 time in total

Thanks for the thoughts. I have been away a couple of days, which is why I have not replied earlier.

You are absolutely right about the simplicity of a Sage Live CD, rather than a Sage SFS.

I have always thought that if we had a completely modularised Puppy along the lines of Choice Pup there would always be a need for combining some of the common applications into a full Live CD for the complete beginner.

It is a matter of personal taste what those beginner applications should be, both in type and actual program. Endless time is spent on the forum arguing about browsers, whether a spreadsheet program is relevant, etc.

My personal feeling is that a sophisticated maths package is not a beginner thing for Puppy users but, of course, a member of the Sage Community would want it but would be a beginner to Puppy. I guess this is where your viewpoint becomes valid.

The only solution - we need both Live CD and SFS - and, apparently, we have it - great!

I already uploaded them to
www.mydrive.ch
Username: download@sagelive
Password: mathematics

Beside that I had some other fixes:
added swapfilemanager (to autocreate swapspace)
added scratchfiletool (to give paranoid windows NTFS users a possibility for quarantine disk storage)
added Samba-TNG
fix for xgamma-gui (I didn't even knew that xgamma existet, but after my first sagelive version a year ago one of the first responses was that this in not working, so I feel responsible)

I will update also the top Post.

Regarding modularity:
Yes I think the SFS-TXZ linker seems a very interesting project. But I also had a look inside the initrd.gz, there seems a possibility that at least 1 sfs package is loaded "hard wired" by default. This would make production and maintainance of thematic live CD's much easier (Split of Base OS and Addons).

Regarding how to classify "beginner programs"
It all depends on the viewpoint and you are right, my intended target audience is not primarily on this forum, but outside - not even on the sage forum, because there it's rather about big workstations with 16+ cores, and how to compile on solaris etc... . As a fact I think it can be very useful to students of technical/scientific branches, who want to use a powerful software and who don't want to mess to much with the system behind it. Or for the math-prof who want to walk around with his sage puppy on usb stick, or want to install it quickly on some laptop. And personally I like the application mix of puppy very much. I have the feeling if taking them away and have just sage running on a barebone puppy would feel much too dry and no fun anymore.

About criteria
Other aspects, like being open source and free are secondary (thinking of the usual habbit of allowing those extra free copies of 1000$+ priced software to stay in business). In so far, userfriendly-wise we are doing good, especially I must say the windows exe installer makes it easier to install sagelive into a windows system, than any other variant (even easier than a frugal install on linux). With a decent download an inexperienced user can install and test the system in less then 15 minutes. Although it seems huge and bloated to puppy users it will seem lean for windows users and also regular sage users. Packages in the scope of sage usually take up far more than 1 GB of diskspace, so the 630 MB including OS (+Java..) will not scare them away.

So its about providing information and infrastructure, thats why I also set up some webpages with help and info about sagelive (puppy).

Hi, sure I spent a lot of time with the homepage , but its still bug ridden, lots of typos. But I think I gathered lots of useful information, especially on getting things installed. I hope I can improve it gradually ...

Well I came across one very interesting possibility of sage today .

Most of the packages that are bundled inside can be made available "outside".
This was a feature absolutly top on my wishlist, and I just missed that the possibility was always there!

There is not much magic in the scripts. For example, the "gap" script
is

Code:

#!/bin/sh
sage -gap $*

Hence, if I do
gap
in a shell, then in fact "sage -gap" is executed; so, it uses the gap
shipped by Sage, but it doesn't start Sage.

So you can use R, maxima, ipython like normal.

I noticed that there is no script created for python,, but you can create on yourself and you have a working python and access to all libraries (numpy, sympy, pylab).

Code:

#!/bin/sh
sage -python $*

I missed that possibility, so I just made a symlink. But then it is not possible to import the libraries - so creating that script is preferable

About matlab - well its about numeric. Its main application is in the engineering sector, and they have a great set of extensions (toolboxes).

I compiled octave, which is an open source project which keeps very close to the matlab syntax. I had it compiled and you can download it from
//http:boxen.math.washington.edu/MathSoftware/Puppy4/Octave

I think best is you install all pets (with the exception of fortran, thats already included in sagelive). From the sage notebook therre is an interface to octave (and I guess even to matlab) so you have an integrating workbench.

Just thought I would report back to say I frugally installed the latest update on my laptop with 512K RAM. I then used the pfix=nocopy boot code and everything worked fine.

There was a little delay when complex calcs were done but it was acceptable.

I also got Sage running in the browser rather than the command line. Still need to understand fully this mode - how to print things etc. and how to correct things when you make a mistake in entry and the wrong result comes out. You don't want errors to print out!

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